Sunday, April 26, 2015

Rethinking Domain-Level Play in the Hill Cantons

If you've followed this blog for longer
than you reasonably should, you may remember that 3-4 years back I had
spent a good deal of time exploring domain level play. Indeed I ran
two whole campaigns, the Domain Game I and II, revolving around that
kind of play while trying to hothouse a whole rules supplement, the
Borderlands.

My own gaming and writing was swimming
around in a zeitgeist pool at that time--with ACKs and An
Echo Resounding coming into being as the best published answers
to that great supposedly unfulfilled promise of the “End Game.”

Eighty-odd pages of Borderlands were
finished and it was closing in on that last push for being published.
And then I balked it. I won't get into the nitty gritty (and some of it was an easy "I'm kind of tired of this shit" answer) let's leave it at “I was deeply dissatisfied
with how it played.” In a nutshell it failed in the same way I
believe most other attempts have failed by not making the “main
thing” the main thing.

Anywho there is a lot meat here for a
post debating the game design question “why most domain rules for
D&D don't build meaningful, engaging long-term play for D&D
campaigns.”

Instead it aimed to be more like the King of
Dragon Pass and the freeform wargame Matrix Game. With NPC advisers carrying and hiding most of the actual
domain business (by being “clicked on”) and presenting decision
points that gave players choice without swamping the site-based
adventure that is D&D's main thing. The system is still pretty
underdeveloped and the results somewhat a mixed bag from my
perspective to be sure.

But that's the fun of hothousing these things
in actual play, right?

An explored section of the Feral Shore.

Here's an actual example from campaign play. (Okko is a
frozen-in-time trap engineer NPC the party rescued and recruited to
be the chief steward of their Feral Shore colony.)

Okko's Report on King's TenOkko
seems to warm to his job and appears to be loyal, able and competent
from what you observe. He gives you the following report on how he
sees things.

What Okko is buying/building with the 1000
suns (all work listed will be done before next week by the available
labor):1. Two 10-by-30 foot cypress-wood and thatch longhouses.
One to be used as a workshop, the other for meetings/light work in
the day and sleeping area for 15 at night.2. A cypress-wood
stockade roughly 6-foot high to enclose the area before a proper
wooden palisade can be built.3. 10 medium-sized tents for
temporary housing4. An on-site worker of wood and
blacksmith5. Food for the party and all the hired help for a
month.

What Okko wants to know:Do you want to keep
this site as the basecamp? He lays out the pros and cons of the
site below and says that since no work has been done yet that he can
hold off on the work above if you want to place it somewhere
else.

Site Pros1. The soil seems fairly rich and
arable.2. Killing off the two crocs seems to have cleared
out the area of its most spectacular resident menace. There are
normal-sized crocs in the area but nothing as comparable or
aggressive.3. The surrounding flooded areas and serpentine-like
higher ground areas are pretty defensible4. You have plenty of
fresh (if brackish) water.

Site Cons1. It's in the
Weird (makes the hired help extremely nervous and likely to mean
higher chances of encountering beings who live in the Weird.)2.
It's surrounded by a swamp (bugs, humidity and mud).

Domain Skills and
Resolution
Each PC can take a Major concentration and a Minor
from the following list and computes their skill on the second chart
below.

Domain Score
x1
level for your Major
x.5 level for your Minor (round down)
+/-
best single ability modifier for INT, WIS and CHA
+/-
special circumstances (things like education in a certain skill,
upbringing, etc)

Example: Kraggo of the Mountains is a 4th
level fighter with a 7 INT, 11 WIS and 17 CHA. He takes Martial for
his Major which gives him for 4 for his lets plus 2 for his CHA for a
total of 6. He takes Ranging as his minor for a total of 2.

Domain
Ring NPCs

The Domain Ring is your team of NPC
advisers. Beyond providing for gamable action points in and between
sessions Ring NPCs are the ones taking on the actual (and often
boring and/or granular) tasks of running the demense. Delegating work
to the Ring represents “rule by sinecure” inherent for a game
where the PCs are adventurers first and has a mechanical advantage as
such. A single PC can add their skill level (must be the exact skill
being used by the NPC) to any domain action roll taken by a Ring NPC.

Domain Action Resolution
If there is
a particular situation that I think will call for a roll against an
appropriate PC or NPC's relevant skill. The relative difficulty of
the course of action described will be adjudicated secretly from my
judgment of what is described.